Director interviews

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 119 You don’t need a ticket to see the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s most recent production of Hamlet. You don’t even need to leave your house. All you need is a virtual reality device. Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s…

Shakespeare Unlimited : Episode 106 Director Peter Sellars once staged Antony and Cleopatra in a Harvard dormitory swimming pool. His King Lear owned a Lincoln Continental. His work is complex. But what confounds some audience members has also won him ardent…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 82 How do actors breathe life into Shakespeare’s texts? How do they take language that’s centuries old and make it sound so real and immediate? Barry Edelstein, the Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director at The Old Globe…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 77 Will, the new series on TNT, tells stories derived from what we often call Shakespeare’s “lost years”—the time before he made a name for himself as a writer. The series takes advantage of that gaping hole…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 76 In 2012, the Donmar Warehouse opened an all-female production of Julius Caesar, directed by Tony Award-nominated director Phyllida Lloyd and starring Harriet Walter as Brutus. The production was set in a womens’ prison, and would be…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 75 Twenty-first-century wizardry meets the seventeenth-century kind in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest with digital effects created by The Imaginarium, a performance-capture company that’s best known for movie and video game animations.  This production…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 73 In 2014, Shakespeare’s Globe in London sent a group of actors on a two-year tour to perform Hamlet all around the world. They finished on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016, after having traveled…

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016, Chicago mobilized the city’s cultural and administrative resources in an unprecedented way. In this episode of the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, Barbara Gaines, founder and Artistic Director…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 10 Shakespeare’s words and stories may be timeless, but what does that mean when you stage his plays for a modern American audience? That’s a challenge that artistic directors relish as they explore the plays’ many possibilities.…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 5 How can young people connect with Shakespeare? It’s a question that confronts each generation. Members of Taffety Punk, a Washington, DC, theater company, have taken to heart the mission of bringing Shakespeare into the 21st century.…